Recoil

Chapter: Tailor Made

The rural road seemed to stretch out endlessly, headed towards the dusty horizon, and Derek could only grimace at the thought of the long walk back that he faced. At least another four miles of sporadically lit country lanes were between him and any other semblance of civilisation, as well as the medical attention he was in desperate need of. He listed to the left, his right arm crossed to smother the seeping wound just shy of his spleen, his left arm awash with blood from another injury, the claret tarnishing his suit sleeve and dripping from his pinky onto the briefcase he still carried.
If he were any other man, he’d be counting his blessings that the bullet hadn’t torn through any organs. But Derek was hardly any other man. He had been through worse, his body had become a gallery of scars over the years.
From his time in the Garda ERU during The Troubles, to the controversy that ended his and three colleagues’ careers, to his sub-sequential activity in the Republican Movement. It all had taken its toll. Until, by 1998, he found himself at a loss with the Good Friday Agreement. A man apart, changed irrevocably by his own country, Derek turned to the only life he thought available to him: crime.
At first it was just to survive, he never harmed anyone without apt necessity or fair caution, he just needed to get by. But greed soon bettered his humility. Armed robberies and some time on the inside were what had gotten him into the sorry situation he was in now, hobbling along with his insides haemorrhaging. Prison was when he met Kearney Donovan.
* * *
Kearney Donovan was an enforcer for the O’Driscoll brothers. A stubby, muscular man with short, fiery-red curls and nigh-on navy blue eyes. He was doing time for GBH and manslaughter after a stubborn client of his bosses had refused to pay his respects and Kearney has been sent to collect. He came back with the money, alright, but the messy trail he left behind caught up with him when the police tracked down the man responsible for Mr. Cully’s trip to the Intensive Care Unit and his wife’s unfortunate demise. The price was too high for even his bosses to pay off and Donovan went down – silently, lips sealed. Immunity, witness protection, full pardons and all other sorts of deals were offered but Kearney stood as a vigil of honour for his associates, his family and took the heat without so much as breaking a sweat. Life on the inside wasn’t so bad for a man of his reputation either. Anyone who thought he might be vulnerable without the family to help him were sorely mistaken.
Five years into his sentence he watched as the New Guys came to terms with prison life. One in particular caught his attention. An unassuming inmate, lanky and somewhat ill-looking, with a taint of menace beneath his cool exterior, was offered Kearney’s hand in friendship after a notoriously memorable incident in one of the prison’s tailoring workshops. Derek Tinney had just unknowingly been put on the O’Driscoll family’s radar.
“What’s yer name lad? Or should I just call you The Tailor?”
Donovan grinned from ear to ear.
Derek, sat wiping another man’s blood from his hands, looked up. A friendly looking face smiled back at him with a brazen, hard-worked hand outstretched towards him. Older than his years, with a five o’clock shadow and a touch of the crazies in his deep blue eyes, Derek thought, but friendly nonetheless. He also figured he should make as many allies as possible after the stunt he had just pulled. Donovan took his hand and helped him to his feet.
“Thanks… I’m Derek. Derek Tinney. You?” he uttered through breath he still hadn’t quite regained from his skirmish.
“Donovan!” Kearney boomed back in a fearsomely friendly tone, “First name’s Kearney but I never much cared for it!” he paused to grin again, “That was quite a show you put on, Derek Tinney, oughta learn old Dean that not all the new fishies are easy catches.”
He winked and laughed.
“Just looking out for meself, like…”
“Well, Derek Tinney, yer won’t need’ta s’long as you’re seen talking to me here now. Needn’t worry about any folks any more.”
“Oh?” Derek took his attention away from the dried, now crusting blood on his hands since their discourse began.
“Let’s just say,” Donovan winked again, “I have some sway around here. Anything happens to me in here, the guys who did it are gonna wish they never get out. Same fer you now too, Derek Tinney, they’ve seen who yer friends are now. Smoke?”
Derek accepted, politely, trying to solve the puzzle in his still adrenaline-riddled mind. He came to a conclusion and after few pulls on one of Donovan’s poorly rolled cigarettes he built the courage to ask him outright.
“So, Kear… Donovan,” he stopped to take another drag, “so you’re a wiseguy of sorts then, a gangster? Right?”
The light in Donovan’s eye dissipated and his smile along with it. He stared into space, beyond Derek and his inquisitive eyes. Derek breathed deep and slowly clenched a fist. ‘Here we go again’, he figured. Donovan exhaled slowly, purposefully, smoke clouding between the two men. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and slowly, deliberately extinguished it with his foot before shifting. Derek felt the old familiar sting of shit about to hit the fan, released his fist and instead focused on the cigarette in his other hand. ‘Grab his jaw, stub in the face’ he mentally repeated to himself, ‘Grab jaw, stub cigarette… Grab jaw…’
“You seem like a smart fella, Derek Tinney. How about we find a quiet spot to have a more private chit-chat, eh?”
The smile and blaze of Donovan’s eyes were back as if his temperament had been without change. Still unsure of his motives Derek followed cautiously. After all, better to chance having a friendship with the guy who probably just saved him from the vengeance of half a dozen inmates than to be the morgue’s next untimely resident.
It was that chit-chat with Kearney Donovan that landed Derek his next job: working alongside his fellow prison alumni for the O’Driscoll brothers, Guy and Colm, some six years later. Kearney’s sense of humour made it especially enjoyable for himself when he introduced Derek to the brothers as ‘The Tailor’ because ‘every kill is made to fit’. Derek was the butt of many a joke before he officially adopted the moniker himself for the sake of shutting Kearney up. Though he would never admit to to Donovan, part of him did enjoy leaving his signature, a pair of tailoring scissors, at the scene of the crime – it made him feel like a movie villain, always one step ahead of both his target and his pursuers.
* * *
Now, here he was, some nine years out of prison and stumbling home like a drunk with his ineptitude at stitching just about keeping his insides just there, less they venture anywhere they ought not to.
Focusing his eyes on the road ahead he left his mind to wander as to how the job had gone so wrong. It was supposed to be a routine hit, he had pulled just shy of twenty five times now; some easier than others, all of them easier to swallow than the last, this was not how he imagined a straight forward job would wind up. ‘Why were the husband and kid there?’ he kept asking himself. ‘How on Earth did they know the brothers had sent them a late night visitor? Why were the three of them armed to the teeth, ready to greet me?’
Derek could only baffle himself with theories as a debilitating agony ripped through him and reminded him of the showdown he had barely emerged from as the victor. He stumbled to one knee and gave out an involuntary yelp, the impromptu morphine cocktail was wearing off and stirring his wounds back into consciousness. ‘Christ Almighty, what a mess.’ He thought again of the messy scene he had left behind, too badly injured to clean up after himself he had done his best at a field dressing and left – the scene tainted with his blood amongst that of the three victims’.
‘Maybe I’ll catch a break and the forensics team will miss my blood spatters’, he thought. ‘Ha, un-fucking-likely!… “A simple job”, they said, “it’ll be easy”, they said.”’, Derek couldn’t help but then laugh at the fact that he retained his scathing sarcasm in spite of the ridiculous turn of events.
Taking several deep breaths his urged, demanded his body to respond, eventually dragged himself to his feet and shuffled onwards with his thoughts returning to the job gone awry.
* * *
He had knocked pleasantly at the door to the secluded country house his target – Mrs. Mary-Ann Lively – lived in, hoping his old ‘lost stranger’ act would once again do half of the work for him but when the door didn’t open and a man’s voice asked who was knocking at such an hour, Derek’s wits told him to take cover. Leaning up against the wall next to the front door he replied in what Donovan had come to affectionately call his ‘Oscar winning performance’.
“Hi… my car… it’s broken down,” he had started with a fake yet entirely believable shakiness in his voice, “I could do with using a phone… please”. He slipped his hand into his briefcase and retrieved his silenced weapon.
The reply was as he surmised it would be: two rounds of buckshot shredded the door and a woman screamed.
“It’s okay Mary-Ann, stay calm please, and get Denny down here.” the man’s voice was surprisingly calm and collected for having just shot a man – or so he believed.
Derek took his chance, assuming he was only up against a double-barrelled shotgun and believed dead then why would the man reload?, dropped to the ground and sprawled himself on the front step face-down. He lay there, playing possum as the door unlocked and opened an inch. The woman shrieked in terror.
“Don’t go out Don, what if there’s more than one of them?”
The door closed to and Derek listened to muffled voices, Don reassuring Mary-Ann that he was positively sure there was only one and he had just shot him. Derek grinned to himself.
He waited for his supposed executioner to open the door again and investigate his kill. Cool light shed over him as the front door swung open but was quickly blotted out by the guardian husband.
“Get Denny, I’m goin’a need help shifting this guy.” he looked around, “Mary-Ann? Did you hear me?”
“Yes… yes… I’ll get him.”
Derek heard her head upstairs, her cries for Denny botched by sobs and adrenaline, and waited for the inevitable. Don was stood over him now. He lay his shotgun down and let out a breath it seemed he had been holding since the door was knocked.
“Alright then,” he said to Derek’s back, “let’s see which one of you cunts it is…”
Grabbing Derek by the shoulder and waist he rolled the limp man onto his back. His heavy breathing was enough to mask even the already suppressed pistol Derek rolled over with and shoved into the big man’s plentiful gut. He pulled the trigger moments after trying to get his free hand over the man’s mouth but the smothered cry of pain, surprise and rage was enough to get Mary-Ann’s attention. He held the man aloft and raised the pistol to his head while turning his own away. Blood sprayed out of the back of Don’s head and down onto Derek’s right cheek.
“DON?!” Mary-Ann screamed. “DON?! DENNY! OH GOD. DENNY! COME QUICK!”
She reached the front step in time to see her beloved being dumped at the feet of his killer. She screamed, ran her hands to her mouth and seemed to buckle from some unseen assailant who had kicked the legs from beneath her.
“Mom?!” a teenage voice asked from somewhere within the house.
Wiping blood from his face, Derek moved in for the hit. The woman before him didn’t seem to care. She simply sobbed for her lover who lay before her with a gaping hole in the back of his head. Derek pushed the barrel of his gun against her scalp and whispered to her, “You knew this would happen, now you’ve gone and got him” he jerked his head in the direction of Don’s corpse, “and your kid killed too. Goodbye.”
He stood back up and ceased her weeping with another round from his pistol and headed inside to find the boy, the last witness.
‘A loose end this selfish bitch had to drag into this’ he mused, but it didn’t change that fact that no witnesses meant NO WITNESSES.
Ruling out downstairs by default Derek went in search of the staircase. Aided, involuntarily, by his new target.
“M… mom? D… d… dad?”
‘Too easy, kid.’ Derek couldn’t help but think, ‘At least it won’t be drawn out. Sorry your idiot parents put you in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
He rounded the corner the boy’s voice came from, pistol ready but…
Nothing.
‘Hmm, maybe he’s smartened up to the silence.’
The kid had stopped moving and held his tongue. No calling out. No footsteps.
Derek found the stairs but before he even reached the second step a deafening crack rang throughout the old house. It took Derek a moment to recognise the sound of unsuppressed gunfire. He threw himself back as three more shots sounded out from atop the darkened upstairs, one grazing his arm.
“Little bastard!”, he seethed.
Two more shots came his way. The kid was almost out of ammo and throwing his remaining shots away like pennies at an arcade.
‘I have to coax him out of there… think God damn you, think!’
A few moments of silence fell about the house.
‘Got it!’
“Kid, come on out and now it’ll be quick! No need to suffer like your ma or pa,” he warned.
No answer.
“We both know who’s goin’a come out on top here so why not just give in to it already?”
Still a stoic silence from the boy.
“Okay… okay… Fuck you, I’ll put a hole in your head like I just did Mummy and Daddy!”
The last attempt received the exact reaction Derek had hoped for. Enraged, the distraught boy – no older than seventeen – came screaming bloody murder down the stairs. Coolly, Derek stepped out from his cover and planted a round in the kid’s knee. His face transformed from that of vengeance and rage to one of shock, confusion and extreme agony and  fear as he buckled under his mangled knee and crashed down the stairs.
Derek sighed and weighed up his gun before moving over to him.
“Sorry about this, lad, but Mummy was supposed to be home alone, you’ve only got her to blame for this.”
The son lay at the foot of the stairs, eyes swelling with pain and tears, his knee blown out.
“Wa… wait… ple… please…” he held his hand up against Derek’s pistol as if to shield himself, “there… ther… somethin… some…” Derek narrowed his eyes.
“What, something I need to know?”
The boy gave an almost unnoticeable nod.
“What’s that then, lad?”
“I…” groaned and trailed off, the pain too great for him to speak in anything above a whisper, inviting Derek to lean in close to hear him.
“I’ll see you in Hell!” he finally spat out.
Derek smiled, “Heh, cute, kid. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye!” Denny replied and with all his remaining strength pulled his arm up.
Derek’s eyes widened.
The gun he had thought used up was still somehow in the kid’s hands even after his fall.
A single, final shot left it.
* * *
The bullet tore through cotton, silk and plastic before penetrating Derek’s abdomen and threw him against the corner of a door frame which he pirouetted off and landed, face down, in the next room. He fought every fibre of his being into getting back up. The boy lay still, laughing at the ceiling, a sick laughter interrupted only be the coughing and spluttering of blood and pain. Derek rolled over and put pressure on his wound and pulled himself to a seated position to get a clear shot. The kid’s left cheek imploded as the bullet passed through and out just below the opposite ear. A bemused look remained on his face as Derek got up and hobbled over to him and put another round in his head to be sure.
“What a fucking mess…” he exclaimed to nobody, and tripped backwards into a wall and slid down it. His briefcase, with his small supply of medical equipment he kept in case of situations like this (although he had never quite been in a situation like this, with a teenager’s life on his conscience), was still outside with Don.
“Alcohol,” he muttered to himself, “I need alcohol.”
Recklessly crashing from room to room, Derek raided every cabinet and cupboard he thought would be home to a bottle of vodka or scotch. Making his way past the boy’s staring corpse again he found what he needed in a pantry just before the kitchen door.
“Such a waste…” he laughed with himself before talking a giant gulp of vodka and pouring the remnants of the bottle over his wounds.
“BASTARD!” His eyes automatically shot a venomous glare towards the dead boy, still staring emptily at the ceiling, as his smarting wounds brought tears to his eyes. Composing himself, he grabbed a bottle of scotch and made for the front door. His briefcase was exactly where he left it before his brief skirmish with Don Lively.
“Not so fucking lively now, are ya? Haha”. He still couldn’t shake that sarcasm even during a clusterfuck as bad as this.
He set himself down against the wall and opened his briefcase to take out what he needed – bandages, dressing, morphine and his signature scissors so he could remove the wedged bullet next to his spleen.
‘Fuck, this is going to hurt’ his body felt the need to remind him.
“Okay,” Derek reassured himself. “Better sooner than later.”
He removed his jacket – discovering the bullet had smashed his phone in the inside pocket – and unbuttoning his shirt. Each button quickened his breathing and his throat felt shallow. His scissors sat idly in his hand as his mind broke into argument.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
‘Just do it already!’
‘Rip it out and get the fuck outta here!’
‘Fuck, fuck, FUCK!’
‘Just do it you pussy maggot piece of shit!’
“AH, FUCK!” he cried as the scissors made their entry.
“FUCCCKKKGHHHH!”
He stopped short to catch breath and stop himself from coughing and babbling. Part of it was over at least. He breathed deeply, let it out slowly, took another swig of scotch for courage.
‘I wonder what the fuck I look like, a man with a pair of scissors half pushed into himself, stinking of vodka and scotch. Ha, what a sight’
He pushed the scissors further in until he felt resistance.
‘Sure fucking hope you’re not anything important.’ he thought briefly before clasping the scissors around the obstruction. No give, no more pain than usual. It was the bullet.
“One for the road,” he toasted the moonlight and necked more scotch and began to slowly tug the bullet from its temporary residence.
The remote location gave him freedom to voice his discomfort and pain without fear of a nosy neighbour investigating and by the time he had the bullet more or less out he began giggling with delirium.
“Holy fuck..” he started.
‘…that must be what it’s like to kill yourself. Gotta grab that one moment with the biggest balls you could muster and just go ape shit at it. Shitting Hell.’
The bullet was out. Derek half-thought about keeping it as a trophy of sorts. For now he pocketed it and would ponder on the matter later. He doubted that he would like to be reminded about this particular job at the same time as remembering how close to taking death’s hand he had come. Right now he had to get the fuck out of dodge, back to the brothers, tell them what happened and see what could be done about it.
He administered himself a small shot of morphine for the pain before packing up as best he could and heading towards the sporadically lit country lane with nothing but disdain in his heart.
* * *
“What a feckin’ mess…” he reiterated once again, still shaking his head in disbelief, with the country lane spreading before him as endlessly as it had done an hour before when he had left the house. His mind raced. Despite renouncing it himself, his mother’s faith had been hammered into him from an early age and the paranoia that damnation might exist kept sneaking up his spine and into the back of his head.
‘Just how the fuck am I supposed to get away with this one? Triple homicide? One of them a god damn kid! Maybe I’m damned to walk this road forever, this purgatory road to nowhere…’
He didn’t even want to humour the thought of what kind of sentence that would carry. Against his previous convictions too, he would be “Royally fucked in his fuck hole” as Donovan would say.
The lane grew narrow and Derek immediately knew he wasn’t far from a safe house now. From here it was twenty-five minutes of stern walking for any healthy man but for him it would be closer to forty minutes.
‘Doesn’t really matter either way. There’ll be a phone. And better means of patching myself up. Anyhoo this clusterfuck is about to get a shite sight better.’
The rest of Derek’s journey seemed to roll by in a mix of euphoric morphine pick-me-ups, internal damnation of his soul and agonising shots of pain if he exerted himself too much. Donovan’s safe house came into view some ten minutes after the last of the morphine was used up and Derek picked up his pace, battling through the bolts of pain that each uneven step caused.